Land of Spirits: Exploring the Paiwan Landscape through Spatial Analysis

This is a hybrid event which will take place in Room 612, 6th floor of the UCL Institute of Archaeology, and also online via Zoom. Registration for the Zoom event is via the booking link above.

Abstract

The landscape is often thought of as the materialization of memory, fixing social and individual histories in space. It is a meaningfully constituted physical and social environment whereby meaning is ascribed through people’s engagement and experience. The embodiment of social memories in landscapes is crucial to how people perceive and understand the world around them through daily experience and dwelling. This research uses two Paiwan tribes and their abandoned settlement sites to explore the Paiwan landscape and to investigate how perception and experience facilitate the creation and maintenance of social memory. The results suggest that, although the two tribes use the landscape differently, they both maintain a core and coherent cultural concept: that of ‘returning’.

About the Speaker

Dr Mu-Chun Wu is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University. His research focuses on social identity, spatial analysis, computing and landscape. Wu’s doctoral study was on the spatial construct of social communities in Paiwan settlements through the University of Oxford. He is also co-director of a multi-period tumuli landscape project in the Spaćva region in Croatia.

All welcome!